Preview of Wintersday WvW Patch

On the forums Habib Loew has dropped some news about the future of WvW with respect to the patch on December 14th, Wintersday. He has mentioned four new things that will be coming into the game, and below I have summary of those changes, and my thoughts on them.

When a new build is ready on the Guild Wars 2 server you currently get 3 minutes, at best, of notice before you have to log out of the game, patch, and log back in. This could happen while you are at the gates of an enemy keep after you have dropped five golems! Never, fear, Anet has your back.

In order to allow WvW players to make good decions about siege placement, assault timing, etc. we’re adding a new build pre-announcement. This will be in the form of a message broadcast to all players some time before the current build expires.

Have you ever chased down a player and worked them down to a sliver of HP only to have them disappear denying you the kill? Well they were most likely closing their GW2 client before you could kill them. Well, no longer, Anet is here with a fix!

If someone that you’re fighting disconnects during combat (via Alt+F4, killing the client process, etc.) their character will be instantly killed, death penalties will be applied, and XP & loot will be handed out as usual.

Also, there is the situation with wall and gate repair. At present you simply need to use a single unit of supply on a wall or gate and it instantly repairs, dividing armies, and causing unnecessary back and forth. Well Arena Net has a fix for this too.

Destroyed walls and gates will now rebuild when they reach 10% health rather than on the very first repair. This means that when attackers down a wall or gate defenders won’t be able to instantly rebuild it.

Finally, there is a strange addition. I personally have never had a problem with "breaking out" from a totally occupied map, but it seems other are. I worry about the way this will be taking WvW. I want WvW to be a player driven environment, not one driven by NPCs. Anyway, read what Habib has to say,

We’ve added a new event type to WvW called Breakout events which trigger when one or more teams have been pushed completely out of a map. They’re designed both to help players break out of severly camped portal keeps and to provide assistance in establishing a foothold in each map.

I really do not know how I feel about this. I will just have to wait and try it out. There are some more details in the thread on the forums if you are interested. Overall, these seem like solid additions. I have personally been effected by the new build issue, the player disconnect exploit, and the instantly repaired walls. It is nice to see these things fixed. At the end of his post Habib leaves this little teaser,

These changes are just a small part of what the WvW team has been up to lately. As you may have already heard, we’re hard at work on some larger updates that we plan to deliver in February. We’re not quite ready to talk about the details yet but as February gets closer we’ll start to reveal more of our secrets.